


Rubber Roses and Rolling Film

by orphan_account



Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine, Disney Cartoons (Classic), RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternative Semblances, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Cartoon Physics, Ruby Rose is a Faunus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 06:11:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17381123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A tribute to my grandfather, whom I miss dearly, and to his old collection of cartoons on VHS- miss you, you old fuck. I love you.





	1. Phenakistiscope, One: Old Songs

  Ruby meets her grandpa when she is very young, during a family trip to Vacuo. Mom hugs him tight and looks very happy to see him, and he grins wolfishly (as is common with Wolf Faunus such as they), sharp canines glinting in the afternoon light. He kneels and she looks up at him with wonder in tiny eyes, ears twitching atop her head. He blows a little air into her left ear and she sneezes, face scrunching up in surprise. Mom sighs softly.

“Daaad, stop teasing your granddaughter and say hi already.” she grumbles at the man. His salt-and-pepper eyebrows raise at her. “What? I can’t mess with the pup? Yer grandpappy did it to you and you would just laugh and _laugh_ , hun.” he says, Vacuoan drawl stretching the last ‘laugh’ out in a strange way, Mom’s face turning as red as her hairtips are. “Daaaaaaaad!”

He laughs- it’s more of a raspy wheeze that stalls somehow- and turns to look at her, reaching up to ruffle her hair. “Howdy, pup. I’m yer grandpa.” She smiles brightly at him and he smiles right back, eyes full of light. 

—|—|—|—

Grandpa’s house smells like old cologne, hairspray, and what could most possibly be steak and eggs. Her tummy rumbles and her grandfather chuckles. “Hungry, eh, pup? Can’t blame ya. Nothing works up an appetite like travel does.” She nods shyly and he leads her into his kitchen, helping her up into one of the chairs and ruffling her hair again before sedately rummaging through the icebox.

“So, pup, what’s my daughter been feedin’ ya on that cozy little island?” he asks, the word ‘island’ coming out more as ‘eye-len’. She rattles off a few things they’ve eaten recently and he raises an eyebrow. “You ain’t been eatin’ right, then, brat.” She shrugs and asks him to suggest a dish. He grins widely and pulls her chair out from the table and propping it next to the counter. She watches as he gathers up several large slices of meat and gets them going in a pan, the scent of cooking meat filling the house and making her drool a little.

He laughs and has her help him cook, showing her how to beat the two parts of eggs into one solid goo, how to season things, and how to make a breading. It’s hard work for the tiny Faunus, but she gives it her all- no mere bowl of strange powder-y things would defeat the great Crimson Crusader!

After a first bite, she was infinitely grateful for her introduction to the wonders of chicken-fried steak. She doesn’t know how she ever lived without it- she declares it the food of the gods and refuses to eat anything else. The old man cackles, more than simply amused by her excitement, and gives her another one- the poor piece of godsent food doesn’t last a minute on her plate.

—|—|—|—

That night, she sits down on his huge couch while he rummages through the laundry room for some old videos. A stack of nine or ten pillows elevates her enough that she can comfortably lean her head on Grandpa’s shoulder. He turns on the TV after putting in a cubelike box full of tape-looking stuff and it turns on. 

She’s given a crash course in ‘Old Style’ cartoons, rubber hose limbs and all.

She loves it.


	2. Phenakistiscope, Two: Ink

Ruby spends nearly a year practicing to make a nice cartoon in the style her grandfather showed her. She makes Yang and Dad her favorite food (chicken fried steaks) whenever she can. Mom’s been going on longer and longer missions, and that’s a little worrying- she’s pretty good at hunting, right? She puts it out of her mind and focuses on her cartooning, often plugging away into the deep dark of night, squinting at her handspun half-frames, Yang or Mom occasionally dropping by to take sneak peeks at her work.

—|—|—|—

Ruby can’t begin to believe this is real. Mom  _can’t_ be gone! She- she can’t, she said she’d come home in time for the Atlesian Solstice! She _promised!_ The rest of the house are in similar states- disbelieving shock (Yang) and blind rage (Dad), namely. She immediately grabs the house phone and dials a number that’s become muscle memory by now.

“Yeah? This is Ivor Ro-”

“Grandpa, Mama’s gone. She didn’t come back.”

—|—|—|—

At 8, Ruby moves to Vacuo so she can live with Grandpa after an accident involving a runaway cart of unstable Red Dust. Seeing him walk with a cane, while certainly disheartening, still showed that he was a tough old bastard who wouldn’t take anyone’s shit. Not even life’s shit. In his sage words to her, “Life’s a fuckin’ dick, and let’s say that I’ve seen a few too many of those in my day.”

Ruby asks a lot of personal questions about his past. He answers them all honestly, even when Ruby thinks she’s on the verge of knowing more than a little too much. That night, while she’s asleep, there’s a loud bang that startles her awake. She hurries down the stairs and is met with another tragedy- Grandpa is gone, too. Just like Mama. 

There are men with weapons standing around him, several of which are blood-spattered, and all Ruby can see is red. She wants them to go away forever, so they can’t ever hurt anyone again.  The shadows loom around her and drip roiling ink that grows and shapes into a humanoid torso and head- sharp, long teeth glint in the light of a damaged projector. 

The creature descends upon them, and Ruby cannot find it in herself to do anything but smile.


	3. Inkstains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath.

Ruby cradles his cooling body in her arms, sniffling and trying not to cry. Her ink-creature already slaughtered the men who hurt him, and she called the police. They show up in time for the blood to cool on her skin and for his end to have ingrained itself in her mind. The creature can’t maintain itself anymore, burbles out a final scream, and deflates into a chunk of thick, globby tar.

Ruby picks it up, shivering slightly as it sinks into her skin, which takes on a slightly more ashen tone, and waits for someone to come and save her from this waking nightmare.

(A pair of strange hands are dyed red in her dreams, the weak flesh of humans beneath their claws. The Creator believed that they should go away, and the hands carried out what must be done.)

—|—|—|—

Yang is there for both the funeral of her surrogate mother and Ruby’s grandfather. She’s never seen Ruby simultaneously so reserved and so open, tears rolling down her face and ears drooped as she watches both caskets lowered into the ground. She stays to comfort Ruby and Dad, although after Mr. Rose’s funeral she goes back home with Dad.

———

Ruby tucks her unfinished cartoon into Grandpa’s hand before they close the casket and closes his hand over it. She presses a kiss to his cheek and tells him goodnight before going into the crowd, weaving past most of the people there.

“Hey, kid,” a teenager with red hair and horns says, his face grim. There’s something about him that’s very, very dangerous- and not just the sword at his hip. “How’d you know the first Faunus to ever make cartoons professionally?”

Ruby offers him a small, sad smile, ears half-drooping. “He was my Grandpa, mister.” The man offers her his condolences and a small flip-phone. “If you find out anything about the people who did thi-” Ruby smiles a little wider, eyes sparking with a small flicker of broken-souled madness.

 “They went to sleep, just like him. The Ink put them to bed like they did to Grandpa.”

The teen smiles wider, eyes glinting with a manic glee. “Keep the phone, kid. We might talk again sometime. The White Fang wants to see potential like that.”


	4. Body of Faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You just have to believe.

Her life is much more dull after Grandpa and Mom die. Dad has so many missions to go on that he shows up at home once every four months, Yang spends more nights over at friends’ houses or with Uncle Qrow than with her, and most of the time her only company is whatever comes on CCTS-TV. 

She plays around with ink more- it oozes from the vents, the walls, beneath her bed, sloshes in the basement and leaks from the attic, comes from the faucets and the showerhead- and learns how to control it. It’s not a pretty process, but she teaches herself to make it move, and then to remove and summon it. The house is flooded with ink and then drained several times, leaving every inch of the place spotless, although the carpets are now black instead of beige.

She learns how to summon her ‘friend’, whomst she ~~very unimpressively~~ names Inky. He’s a good pal, and they watch a lot of bad TV shows together. She starts to draw and make cartoons again, and her monstrous familiar is surprisingly good at copying her- in the time it took her to make half of one before, she can now make a whole frame!

But Inky’s actually kinda bad at it, too, and so she waits for him to explode before drawing up a new body for him on a piece of notebook paper- a tall, lanky creature in a wolf mask. She tries to summon him through the paper several times, prompting her to try and summon ink _through the paper._

It works! Inky’s new body springs to life and stretches out, towering over her and getting his head chopped off by the ceiling fan. Ruby sighs and sketches out a slightly smaller-sized version of him before re-spawning him. This time, he’s much more aptly sized, only about as tall as Yang. She focuses on Inky and channels ink into him until he’s much more Yang-ish in shape overall, and renames her to **Ink Yang.**

Ink Yang doesn’t really tell bad puns, but she does know how to draw Actual Yang’s face, and that’s pretty neat, but also kinda creepy. Ruby pulls more ink through the drawing of Actual Yang’s face and it comes out of the paper as a mask, which Ink Yang puts on. She changes into an exact black and white copy of Yang, although with gloves and boots like from the cartoons and a cute little bow tie on her black sleepclothes.

Ink Yang rolls the gloves and socks up, their thick ends apparently just extra, rolled up fabric, giving her knee-high white silk stockings and elbow-high arm covers of soft white silk. She gives her doppel-sister a hug and is pleasantly surprised to find that she is both as warm as the original and as warm and squishy as her, too!

Ink Yang- alternatively name Doppelyänger in honor of her sister’s awful puns- can lift her up so she can reach high shelves, but only once before she needs a second to get her strength back. If Ruby concentrates super hard and feeds a steady supply of ink into her, Ink Yang can take a solid shape without needing to be in the same room as Ruby, being able to go all the way to the edge of the trees without needing to come back. 

Ruby spends a few hours on the Dustnet, attempting to look up how to make ink by hand, and learns a whole bunch. Sadly, she has no money to buy ink-making reagents with.

She vows to make Ink Yang a body that can follow her anywhere.


	5. Projected Fate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What do you see in the glass?

Ruby walks through the forests of Patch with Ink Yang, a kitchen knife in one of her hands. The Ink-Yang has her weapons of choice, Ember Celica oddly cartoonish-looking. They- just like Yang, actually- are tinted in a strange beige-sepia hybrid, like Grandpa’s old cartoons. As she moves, flickers like the scratches of old film glitch across her like she has actually just leapt from a projector screen and into this reality. 

The mists of early morning waft around their feet, and Ruby’s ears swivel as a stick crunches nearby. Ink-Yang flicks her wrists, her weapons sliding into place and arming. She clenches her fists and looks around, clearly excited at the probability of a brawl. There is a low, shuddering growl as a large Beowolf busts through the underbrush and diving for Ruby.

Ink-Yang’s fist slams into the side of its head and a shell fires off, turning the creature’s head into black mist chili. The mist swirls into her arm and she shudders and the mist melds into her ink. She looks at her creator and holds out the arm. Ruby traces her fingers across Ink-Yang’s arm and smiles. “You don’t feel fake anymore... it’s like you’re really here, huh?”

They go back home, but not until after Ruby surrounds the Grimm’s corpse in ink. The mist of its decaying form melds into it, breathing enough life into the ink to make it truly powerful.

———

Ruby spends the rest of that day messing with her new ink, practicing her control of it and attempting to enhance Ink-Yang. She spends enough time thinking (and attempting to apply her new ink to things) to ask herself something: maybe normal ink can be used as a pigment? 

She brings Ink-Yang (Yin? Yin’s probably a better name.) a pen with yellow ink- one of Yang’s, conveniently- and asks her if she can use the color of the ink. Yin cracks the top off and tips it back- her hair blooms yellow, taking on a sun-bright tone that Ruby can practically taste as being Yang’s color. 

Ruby, now overjoyed, rushes off to acquire purple and red ink pens- Yin was almost truly complete.

——(She offhandedly wonders if she has some weird ink-synesthesia.)——

Yin looks like Yang, completely and utterly, and Ruby is just happy to have company. She goes out with Ruby into town and most people don’t even recognize a difference, though a few ask her why she isn’t talking. She panics a little, but scours through Ruby’s memories of Yang and makes the most logical decision she can.

She shrugs, and Ruby saves her ass-  she explains that ‘Yang’ had a throat sickness that fucked up her voice. She’d be talking soon, though, and that it was nothing to worry about. Yin is grateful that her ~~_**Creator**_~~  little sister is so kind.

They head home and Yin writes out a question on the wall with her ink: **How will I get a voice?**

Ruby smiles and presents her plan to her greatest creation.

———

Yang takes a shower, but doesn’t notice the ink flowing up out of the drain. She doesn’t feel it go into her skin- the ink simply presses there and her skin takes it in, just like how writing on yourself with a pen works- and map her body heartbeat by heartbeat.

She doesn’t feel it retreat back down the drain and hear it come out of the sink, see it become a perfect copy of her, or hear it sneak out of the room.

———

“Hey, Ruby?” 

Ruby’s ears perk and she turns to look at Yang, who smiles. Something feels off, though, and as soon as Ruby realizes it she gives Yin a million-watt smile right back. 

She and Yin spend a few hours designing an alternate clothing scheme for her, solely so Ruby wouldn’t get confused so easily. She draws the clothes out, but Yin leads the project- they eventually settle on a silky black dress with slits along the thighs (so Yin’s cute thigh-highs can be “shown off”, in her words) and a nice pair of heeled combat boots.

Ruby vehemently disagrees with the heels, but Yin refuses to wear anything else- they have an ~~hour-long shouting match~~ little talk about ‘life choices’, which Yin wins by merit of being able to yell louder- and Yin is given her way.

(The post-fight sisterly hugs make up for it.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ruby: make yourself a perfect copy of Yang’s vocal chords by sneaking into a shower with her
> 
> Yin: lol k sis


End file.
